Getting Lost in the Matrix With Chanel and Hermès

PARIS — On the penultimate day of fashion month, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, fresh from defending her city during L’Affaire Kardashian, held a small breakfast in the gilded rooms of the Hôtel de Ville with assorted media figures and the titans of the Fédération Française de la Couture, French fashion’s governing body, to celebrate the industry.

“This is an essential sector,” she told guests as they sipped coffee and ignored the croissants. “Paris is not a capital of crime, but a capital of fashion.” Then she talked about diversity, and asked for advice in getting the word out.

Less than an hour later, Karl Lagerfeld built a supercomputer in the glass environs of the Grand Palais, complete with snaking multicolored cables and blinking little green lights, the better to send images and ideas from his Chanel show into the ethosphere. Big data was on the case!

In what turned out to be a relatively low-tech show of classic Chanel suits in electric circuit-board tweeds and sporty shapes — the blouson jacket, the tennis skirt — all mixed and matched with lacy peach-toned lingerie and light-up handbags, Mr. Lagerfeld dangled the promise of delving into the dueling realities of modern life but didn’t entirely deliver. Instead he served up delicate dresses and digitized sound and light prints, all worn with sideways baseball caps. Even though two masked robotic stormtroopers opened the show, the tone was more breezy than Big Brother. In this, it was entirely linked-in (and wired-up) with much of the week.

Over all, and with one more day to go, it has been an unambitious finale to what had been shaping up as a strikingly political season. In New York, designers practically held election rallies on the runway (one brand actually did). In London, “Brexit” was the subtext to almost every collection as creatives struggled with the idea of Britain’s departure from the European Union. Even Milan seemed to be having something of a collective Berlusconi flashback, and engaged in a coordinated effort to empower the alternative — i.e., women.

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Hermès.CreditValerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

But Ms. Hidalgo’s efforts aside, Paris Fashion Week has been marked by its lack of activism.

Despite a presidential election looming next year, and a “Frexit” that’s on the table, designers have by and large shied away from any overt campaigning, content to offer vague lip service to the need for “optimism” and “joy.”

You can understand it — it’s the safe way out; the inoffensive middle ground — but it has left a lingering sense of emptiness. If they don’t care enough to commit, why should we, to them?

Such was feeling, anyway, when faced with Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski’s collection for Hermès, an absolutely appropriate procession of workwear-inspired separates, jumpsuits and what looked like nurse’s outfits in pastel cotton drill, silk and lambskin. Aside from a fringed leather skirt suit and some very pretty layered bias tank dresses at the end, it was so discreet it practically disappeared. It’s fine to want every individual to be the star, but there’s a difference between providing a platform for personal expression and being entirely passive.

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Sonia Rykiel.CreditValerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

At least at Sonia Rykiel, a house that could be forgiven if its thoughts were elsewhere, given that its founder and namesake passed away in August, the designer Julie de Libran fully pledged herself and her atelier to one idea: liberating the body. Which in practice meant: supersize.

There were giant clown pants in denim and khaki, and tent-like empire-waisted tunics in jacquard; pillowy leather handbags and suede platforms and silk sleeves on maxi dresses stretching to the ground. It was hard to imagine many women wanting to embrace the look (that kind of volume is hard for most bodies to pull off), but it was also hard not to admire Ms. de Libran’s dedication to the line. She went there, whether anyone else wanted to follow or not.

It was at Alexander McQueen, however, that a big idea finally became bigger than itself. On a runway lined with approximately 220 Shetland wedding blankets, traditionally woven in two halves — one by the groom’s family, one by the bride’s — and then knit together with all the best intentions and imperfections left intact, Sarah Burton sent out a beautifully argued case for the allure of unity.

“I was thinking about our team,” she said before the show, “and how we come together, and then also our larger community, and then it seemed applicable much further beyond.” This took the form of thinking about the Shetland Islands (we all have to start somewhere, and she chose those rocky, windswept lands). And given that Scotland, where the Shetland Islands are — and where, not coincidentally, McQueen has some roots; remember Mr. McQueen’s 1995 “Highland Rape” collection? — is rumbling again about leaving Britain as Britain prepares to leave the European Union, you can see what she means.

And you could see it on the runway. In crocheted lace slips so light they could be pulled through a wedding ring and floral lawn empire-waisted dresses under studded leather Boudicca harnesses. In gray and black tartan trousers and jackets worn with varying lengths of kilts to form a new kind of suit and embroidered with jet-beaded thistles. In patchworked Fair Isle knits pinned together with kilt hardware and metal rings. In big studded work boots made to range over the ground, and piles of Celtic jewelry. And in a finale of embroidered cobweb tulle dresses with frothing feather hems that told a tale of shipwrecks and kelpies and adventure fit for a warrior queen.

The fragility and romance was offset by the handicraft and hardiness. They were, indeed, stronger together.